- Friday, September 22, 2023
Prime minister says tackling crime is personally important to him.
By: Chandrashekar Bhat
Prime minister Rishi Sunak vowed to tackle crime as he revealed his worries about his daughter walking to school alone.
He said as the father of two school-age girls, he shared people’s concerns about public safety in the UK.
Sunak who has two daughters – Krishna, 11, and Anoushka, 9 – with his wife Akshata Murty, said he wanted to make sure that “my kids and everyone else can walk around safely,”
“It’s what anyone wants for them – particularly their wife or their sister as well,” the prime minister said.
He recalled he had moved out of his official residence in Downing Street when he was the chancellor to enable his older daughter to walk to school by herself which she could not do for various reasons. Now that he is the prime minister, she cannot go out unescorted.
He said, like many other men, he too took safety “for granted” but the events of the last year “showed us that so many women and girls, actually for a while, have not felt as safe as they should.”
He was referring to the horrific murder of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel who was shot dead by a masked gunman at her home in Liverpool in August this year.
“It brings it home to you as a parent…the awful things that we read about with the young girl Olivia, which we’ll all remember.”
“I come to it as a parent. My eldest is at the age where she’s starting to walk to places by herself or is wanting to.”
Tackling crime and making streets safer for people “is something that’s just personally quite important to me,” because of which he intended to “charge more people and have them in jail”.
“I want to make sure we catch criminals which is why we’re building 10,000 more prison places over the next few years,” the prime minister said.
During his Conservative leadership campaign this summer, Sunak had talked about strengthening laws to tackle crime in Britain.
